Trust

We have a problem in the church today, even the evangelical church. It is a problem of trust.

It is well known that as children of the Enlightenment, it has become our nature to question, doubt, and distrust authority. There is no doubt that such distrust has entered the field of theology with full force. In particular, the Bible has been the most obvious and sustained target of distrust, with scholars, pastors, and laypeople alike all openly casting doubt on the authority and trustworthiness of the Bible. Distrust of the Bible has moved along the scholarly waves, where modernistic naturalism gave way to manuscript evidence, which gave way to textual criticism, which has now largely given way to postmodern critical concepts of canon and/or interpretive agnosticism a la McLaren. And with each wave has come an encyclopedia of (usually) conservative responses that question the trustworthiness of the latest scholarly fancy in view.

From a conservative theological vantage point, evangelicals today have formidable scholarly tools at their disposal to reject efforts to discredit the Bible, or to seriously truncate its applicability and relevance. Along with that, evangelicals are in an increasingly strong position to defend their belief in the trustworthiness of the Bible with intellectual integrity. This is a very good thing, and represents a considerable advance in evangelical scholarship over where we were 30-40 years ago. But along with this has come a problem that needs to be addressed.

While questions about the trustworthiness of the Bible will always be with us, we cannot, while rightfully trying to defend Scripture's trustworthiness, ignore an arguably bigger 'trust' question. Increasingly, the trust issue in Christianity is not centered on the Bible, but on God. For many people, the question is not "Is the Bible trustworthy?", it's "Is God trustworthy?" I would submit that the latter question is the more important and enduring question of the two.

Scripture repeatedly declares God to be trustworthy. I'm not crazy about the whole 'life verse' concept, but if I had a life verse, it would be Nahum 1.7 - "The Lord is good, a refuge in times of trouble. He cares for those who TRUST in him." So it's true that one way to demonstrate that God is trustworthy is to demonstrate that the Bible that says God is trustworthy is also trustworthy. Once that is demonstrated, we often think it's a simple matter of saying, "Look, the Bible says God can be trusted, so that's how we know God can be trusted." And while on one level this is certainly true and deserves to be pointed out at length, it is also true that simply reading words about God has the danger of depersonalizing the reality of God's presence and reliability in not only our lives, but in the lives of those who struggle with the trust issue. In the end, I think it's clear that we need to do more than trust the Bible.

Let me be clear. I believe the Bible is trustworthy, that we should trust it, and that we make a serious mistake if we don't (1Cor 10). But I do think there can be a difference between trusting the Bible and trusting God, and that we need to be careful not to substitute a trust in the Bible for trusting God with our steps. This is where I think the evangelical church needs to improve its preaching and teaching. We have spent so much time and effort (rightfully) in defending the trustworthiness of the Bible that we have spent far less time flushing out a deep robust theology of God's own trustworthiness. And yet, this latter concern is tons more prominent in the pages of Scripture itself than the former concern.

Many books of the Bible both directly and indirectly touch on the issue of God's trustworthiness (entire sections of the Psalms are almost obsessed with this theme). This is not a new question. And often times in the Bible, the remedy for doubts, while including remembrances of God's covenantal and written promises, also involves the aspects of prayer and remembrance of very personal blessings and felt assurances given by God to refresh the hopes of the saints. Just as in Bible days, those of us today who are seeking to demonstrate God's trustworthiness (or to come to know it for the first time) must expand their sphere of trust to include things other than the Bible that nonetheless complement the Bible. A question about God's trustworthiness is an intimately personal and relational question - perhaps the most intimate question that can be asked. We have to understand that responding to such an intensely relational question exclusively by pointing to words on a page will often not be entirely adequate any more than it was for the people in the Bible. To trust God involves more than trusting the Bible. It doesn't exclude trust in the Bible, but it includes other things as well. We know this is true. It's the reason why we can trust every word the Bible says, and still be hesitant to do what it says because we don't trust God the same way we trust the Bible.

If all we do is trust the Bible, and equate this with trusting God and end our striving with trust right there, our trust in God will not set us on fire for the Gospel. We cannot simply say that we trust God just because we trust the Bible, and think that ends the issue. It doesn't, because if it did, the Christian life wouldn't be as much of a struggle of trust as it often is. The evangelical church must continue stressing the trustworthiness of the Bible. But in doing so, we must return to an even greater emphasis on the trustworthiness of God not only in ensuring the trustworthiness of the Bible, but also to stress the intensely personal applicability that a real relational trust brings about. A trust in God and a trust in Scripture cannot be fully separated, as if you can truly and authentically have one without the other. But they are distinct and should not be equated. We are in personal relationship with God. It is God to whom we have appealed for forgiveness. It is God who saves. Ultimately, it is in God where our trust must be, and while this trust includes a trust in the Bible, it is not exclusively that. The sooner we make these kinds of distinctions, the sooner the evangelical church will be able to more fully model the joy and peace of trust to a culture that has been ravaged by the chaos of distrust and desperately wants something better.